Small wonder that politicians, poets, and popes were after his head. McCalman opens the files on a fascinating character—a...
A lively bio of the once celebrated, but now little remembered, charlatan and troublemaker.
Australian humanities scholar McCalman, a learned student of the dark side of the Romantic era, has an excellent subject in the Sicilian count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), a formerly disavowed son of Palermo who has lately been honored with an alley in his name. And what better patron saint for Palermo? So asks an Italian journalist McCalman interviews. Though an “all-around flim-flam man” and “arch-deceiver,” Cagliostro had tremendous likability and undeniable charisma at his service, and with these qualities he ranged among the courts of Europe gathering acolytes and allies and expounding a weird philosophy that he called “Egyptian freemasonry,” which borrowed freely from Judaism and Islam—enough so to raise cries of heresy wherever he went. With his promises of turning base elements into gold and his habit of playing with other people’s money acquired through various exercises in faith-healing, Cagliostro got himself in trouble everywhere he went; he did time in the Bastille, incurred the considerable wrath of Catherine the Great of Russia, and wound up one of the last victims of the Roman inquisition, which saw to it that Cagliostro spent the last years of his life rotting away in prison. Cagliostro seems to have been most effective, in fact, in uniting scattered European intellectuals in a hatred of him: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for one, despised him with a burning passion, though William Blake adored him. Though surely a cad and a quack, writes McCalman, Cagliostro was honest in his own way: he “rarely made wild claims for the chemical values of his nostrums,” insisting that any cures that came to his patients were the result of divine intervention; and he was genuine in his belief that freemasonry could bring about a reconciliation of religions and governments, and with it peace.
Small wonder that politicians, poets, and popes were after his head. McCalman opens the files on a fascinating character—a con man for the ages.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-000690-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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